Past Misdeeds: The Colossus of New York (1958)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


When altruistic scientific genius Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is run over by a truck - which is the sort of thing that can happen when you're running onto a street chasing your son's toy plane - his father, genius brain surgeon William (Otto Kruger) takes the personal loss and the loss to humanity extremely badly. Once I had spent some on-screen time with his surviving son, the semi-genius electronics scientist Henry (John Baragrey), I could understand the old man's feelings quite well, for his father's very pronounced preference for Jeremy has turned Henry into a giant prick, and certainly not the son one wants to spend the rest of one’s life with.

So disturbed by Jeremy's loss is William that he uses his own scientific talents to steal and save his son's brain. It's all for the best of humanity, you see, and certainly hasn't anything at all to do with William's inability to face the death of his child. After some SCIENCE(!) using water tanks, electrodes and other very scientific implements, the brain is as good as new. Now it's time to build a new body for Jeremy's brain, and who better to help out there than Henry? Henry has spent the preceding months trying to take his brother's place with Jeremy's wife Anne (Mala Powers) and son Billy (Charles Herbert), but has been met with a polite indifference he has been unable to parse or wear down; Anne is drawn to the (comparatively) least prickish man in the film, Jeremy's former partner in science John Carrington (Robert Hutton), but that's not something Henry realizes. Do I even need to mention the Spenssers don't find it necessary to tell Anne they're playing with her dead husband's brain?

So William and Henry build a huge, lumbering robot body with a face like an expressionist sculpture for Jeremy, because we couldn't have the man look into a mirror and not have a breakdown, right?

Given how his brand new body looks, and that his dear family tells him his wife and son are dead, the newly mechanized Jeremy takes quite well to the whole situation. Sure, he has a complete breakdown and asks his father to destroy him until the old arse convinces him otherwise, but afterwards he starts on his new experiments that are supposed to make the poles usable for food growth, or something of that sort. Science(!), I dare say. All this does obviously take place in William's lab right in the cellar of the house Anne and Billy live in, too, but hey, when Anne hears something like the horrible screams of her husband when he first sees what he's been turned into, the charming Spenssers can just tell her she's hallucinating because of the strain she has been under, right?

But then, in a development nobody could have seen coming, Robo-Jerry develops fantastic ESP powers, like random precognition, hypnosis and later on the ability to shoot death rays out of his eyes, as you do. I'm sure he won't put the mind whammy on his father to be able to visit his own grave on the first anniversary of his death where he surely won't repeat a scene from a Frankenstein movie with his son.

And surely, the knowledge that his father and brother not only haven't bothered to build him a decent robot body but have also lied to him about his wife and kid won't turn our Jerry a wee bit mad! Man, this transplanting brains into robot bodies business really is pretty difficult.

As you know, Jim, art director and production designer Eugene Lourie did occasionally - and quite successfully - dabble in the direction of 50s giant monster movies. The "monster" in The Colossus of New York is, despite what the film's title and marketing tagline ("Towering above the skyline - an indestructible creature whose eyes rain death and destruction!") might suggest, not one of the giant kind trampling New York into tiny pieces, but rather a brother to the misunderstood creature Frankenstein created. Interestingly, Jeremy, with his ability to speak and think coherently and his planned acts of destruction late in the film is closer to the creature of Mary Shelley's original novel than the more childlike creature of the Universal movies, something that I have difficulty to see as an accident in a script as clearly literary as that Thelma Schnee delivered for the movie.

Schnee's script is a very interesting effort, managing to surround the silly parts and the plot holes you'd expect (and demand) of a film like The Colossus with more complex characters than you'd generally find in a 50s SF/horror film and some pretty poignant scenes concerning the most dysfunctional family I've seen in a genre movie from the 50s. Quite contrary to the traditions of the time, where acting the dick usually makes you the hero of the piece, The Colossus actually seems to realize how dysfunctional and horrific its characters actually are, and makes their flaws the true reason for the minor catastrophe the film's plot culminates in. Sure, there's a short discussion (acted with great gusto by Kruger, who seems to have quite a bit of fun with his mad scientist role throughout the film) about the soul early on in the film, and some of the mandatory "tampering in god's domain" speechifying at its end, but it's also clear that the film's heart isn't in these explanations. Everything bad that happens here comes from the characters' inability to treat each other like actual, complete human beings, and some choice paternalism.


Of course, a complex, yet heavily flawed (and a bit too short), script like this could be easily ruined by the wrong direction style. I'm pretty happy to report that the script at hand wasn't adapted by a poverty row point and shoot director like - say - William Beaudine, but the clearly more artful Lourie, who had no problem recognizing a Freudianized version of Frankenstein when he saw it and used the opportunity to turn his film into as much of a visual homage to early Universal horror movies as a film set in the New York of the 50s (not that we get to see much of it - most of the film takes place in three rooms and a graveyard) can be. For my tastes, Lourie is very successful at it too - at least so successful that most of his film's theoretical silliness turned out to not feel silly at all while I was watching, because the film's finely developed atmosphere turned most of what it surrounded into something serious and riveting.

Gorgo (1961)

Salvage divers and professional assholes Joe Ryan (Bill Travers) and Sam Slade (William Sylvester) stumble upon a very large and dangerous giant reptile probably woken up by a volcanic eruption off the coast of an Irish island.

Initially, the boys were going to grab themselves a treasure buried under the sea there but they decide that catching and stealing a member of a giant unknown species of reptiles is much better business; particularly since it always seem to be others who pay with their lives for the mistakes these two make. Despite a small Irish boy knowing better (Vincent Winter), Joe and Sam manage to catch the animal and rent it out to a circus in London. As it usually goes, nobody involved is actually prepared to secure the dangerous monster they are trying to sell to the public – and the Better Business Bureau is asleep at the wheel – so the animal, now dubbed Gorgo, manages various near breakouts.

Gorgo will be the least of London’s problems, though, for it turns out that it is only the junior version of Gorgo, and its quite a bit more gigantic Ma or Pa does go out of its way to get its baby back, however many famous landmarks may have to be crushed on her or his way.

Gorgo is the final film directed by Eugene Lourie, before he returned to exclusively working as art director and production designer. His handful of films showed Lourie to be a director who really knew his way around giant monsters, resulting in films with generally stronger scripts than most other American or British films of the genre had to offer, as well as with more of a visible personal handwriting.

Despite using the old “giant monster as a circus attraction” bit, Gorgo fits nicely into the cycle of Lourie monster movies. Where, after all, can you find a giant monster movie whose protagonists are quite as unpleasant as Joe and Sam are, with a supporting cast of arrogant military, ineffectual scientists, a greedy Irish harbour master and so on and so forth, with only the usual annoying stupid little boy as the voice of moral and reason (the latter when he’s not running towards giant monsters)? Why, it is as if the film were saying something about the ineffectual and shabby nature of humanity when confronted with things that are metaphorically and literally much larger than themselves; Gorgo is somewhat Lovecraftian in this regard. Of course, a slightly less cosmically horrific worldview tries to assert itself at the end, for there is some child-rescue-based redemption coming for Joe and Sam. One can’t help but ask oneself, though, if the inevitable mob of angry people they’re bound to meet after the end of the movie will care much about our protagonists’ personal redemption.

Other attractions here are Lourie’s decision (not for the first time in his small but valuable giant monster movie making career) to emphasize the human loss like hardly anyone else making these films after the first Godzilla and before Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy did: people are crushed by crumbling buildings, trampled by Gorgo senior, jump desperately out of windows. Lourie was clearly interested in making Gorgo as threatening as possible, with the film’s final scenes of destruction, mostly bathed in red flames, effectively driving the monster home as a natural power humanity has no control of whatsoever, despite a monster suit quite below the Japanese standards as well as the need to use a lot of library and repeat footage during the final half hour of destruction.

Lourie again shows himself as a visual inventive and creative director here, unlike a lot of his low budget colleagues at the time putting visible thought into the staging of scenes, as well as into providing the things the audience was coming to see (giant monsters crushing things) with a degree of thematic resonance. I also applaud the absence of the usual horrible romance, even though I’m not at all happy with the fact that an absence of “romance” in Gorgo’s case also means the complete absence of women from the film outside of the (effective) mass panic scenes. Oh for times when films are allowed to do as much with women as they do with men!

As a whole, though, I find Gorgo nearly as satisfying, and just as interesting as Lourie’s few other directorial efforts, which makes it as fine as Western giant monster movies get.

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On WTF: The Colossus of New York (1958)

What pretends to be a giant monster film is actually an updated reworking of elements from Frankenstein - the Universal movies as well as the novel - featuring male characters who are even larger jerks than was the custom in 50s cinema.

If you're like me, and you like your monster movies weird and clever at the same time, you should really take a look at my write-up of The Colossus of New York over at WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,horror,reviews,other places,otto kruger,mala powers,eugene lourie

The Giant Behemoth (1959)

aka the less pleonastic Behemoth the Sea Monster

Strange things are happening on the coast of Cornwall. First, an elderly fisherman dies of something that looks a lot like radiation burns while uttering the word "behemoth". Then a glowing mass of unknown origin that leaves a different fisherman touching it with burns on his hand and a whole lot of dead fish get left behind by the flood on the same beach. Shortly after that, the fish along the whole Cornish coast are dying.

Fortunately Steve Karnes (dependable American Gene Evans), a North American marine biologist with a clear eye on the dangers of radioactive tests is in the UK and has an easy time convincing Professor Bickford (dependable Brit Andre Morell), the scientist in charge of investigating the reasons for the occurrences, to let him assist in the investigation.

After a bit of research and some doing of SCIENCE(!), Karnes develops the theory that the radiation and the deaths are a mere side effect of a much larger problem: some sort of gigantic, radioactive animal threatening the whole of the UK. Bickford is a bit sceptical about Karnes' theory, but doesn't take too much convincing to come around to the American's views. He's even coming around before he sees a gigantic footprint.

Bickford's (and with him the British authorities') willingness to listen to the American turns out to be rather fortunate, for soon the creature decides to go on a nice weekend vacation in London.

If not for the UK-based setting - thanks to this being a US/UK co-production even a somewhat believable one - one could easily mix up The Giant Behemoth with director Eugene Lourie's other two giant monster movies, The Colossus of New York and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, both of which were mainly taking place around the US. By the standards of giant monster movies of the 50s not made in Japan, there could be worse films to be confused with.

Behemoth belongs to the very earnest class of giant monster movies full of middle-aged men sitting earnestly in earnest looking rooms, with earnest expressions on their faces, discussing an earnest situation very earnestly, and as such, it really is pretty good. The movie is of course a far cry from the emotional and intellectual richness of the original Gojira (the film all earnest giant monster movies tried to yet could not reach before Shusuke Kaneko began making kaiju films), but most of the anti-bomb rhetoric here seems quite a bit less perfunctory and more thoughtful - if not necessarily more scientifically sound - than in many of the film's peers. This side of the movie is additionally emphasised by the look of the radiation burns the behemoth's victims suffer (and often die) from - an element of brutal naturalism I wouldn't have expected in a movie made in 1959. Of course, the film doesn't think its own ideas through as consequently as one would wish it did, but that it has ideas of its own at all seems like quite an achievement to me.

For an art director who was sitting on the director's chair only from time to time, Eugene Lourie's films usually had a rather bland look. In this case, there's some nice use of the actual landscape of the British Isles on display, but not much else that's visually arresting. Lourie's a perfectly competent director, mind you, he's just not more than that.

Perfectly competent seems to be the favourable description of Behemoth's monster too. As rumours say, Willis O'Brien and Pete Peterson had been asked to do the effects scenes only late in the film's development, and had neither time nor money enough to create something truly impressive, so their monster turns out to be a solid but uninspired creation and the effects sequences it appears in are rather variable in quality - the monster's first appearance being the worst of them, its tussle with some electricity lines probably the best.

Still, it's a nice enough example of the sort of giant monster movie that tries to be serious SF too, and as such should provide everyone who isn't hating seriousness or giant monsters with a fine time.

 

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